Goddess (Starcrossed)

mistake of catching Jason’s eye.
    “Zombie Tyrant,” Jason whispered to Lucas, his face turning red with a repressed laugh.
    “Huzzah death,” Lucas whispered back, cracking up. Apparently, that was some kind of inside joke between the Delos boys because all three of them busted out laughing.
    “Enough foolishness,” Pallas said, striding angrily for the door. He stopped and turned. “What part of ‘reducing all mortal cities to rubble’ don’t you understand? We’ve all been warned what’s at stake here, and not just for Scions. I don’t want to be the one who stood by and let a tyrant worse than Stalin or Hitler get away because he seemed like such a nice guy when I met him.” He looked directly at Orion, and then back at everyone else. No one was laughing anymore. “Do you?”
     
    “Ariadne,” Matt called quietly down the upstairs hallway.
    Ariadne stopped at her bedroom door and glanced back at him, holding up a finger to signal for him to wait where he was. She listened for her father, brothers, and cousin, but it wasn’t necessary. Matt could hear all the Delos men, he could even feel their pulses throbbing in the air, and he knew that they were occupied elsewhere. But Ariadne didn’t know this, and he didn’t know how to explain it to her yet. After listening for far longer than Matt needed to, Ariadne finally looked satisfied.
    “Come in,” she whispered, beckoning for him to follow her into her room. He entered uncertainly, standing in the middle of her bedroom while she transferred clothes from one piece of furniture to another without even thinking about putting anything away in her dresser.
    She was always a slob. I spent half the war cleaning up after her, the new part of Matt remembered. Worst slave ever.
    Matt shook his head and tried to push aside the other consciousness that kept popping up uninvited, just as he tried to suppress the flood of familiarity and tenderness he felt toward the girl he was looking at.
    Her bed was just a few feet away. Part of him had never lain beside her and another part of him had spent ten years sleeping next to her—her and no other until the day he died. His hands ached to reach out and touch her again for the first time, so he shoved them in his pockets. He turned his head and stared at the wall as she tossed something silky and lace-trimmed in her closet.
    “Matt?” Ariadne asked from across the room. He looked at her as she flung a long tress of her chestnut hair behind her shoulder, desperately trying not to remember how soft both her hair and her round shoulder felt. “My lingerie isn’t going to strike you blind, you know.”
    “I need to ask you some questions,” he said tersely, deliberately turning the conversation away from her undergarments.
    “Okay.” Ariadne crossed to him and sat on the edge of her bed. Matt took the chair she had just liberated from its burden of laundry and sat opposite her.
    “Tell me about the different roles that the Fates mentioned tonight,” he asked.
    Ariadne smiled, almost like she was expecting this. “You know that the Greeks were in love with theater?” Matt nodded. “Well, the Fates were, too. They always have been. It’s almost like they see the world as a stage, and the Scions are merely their players. In a lot of prophecies, there is mention of certain roles that must be filled, or that the world is waiting to be filled, in order to complete the ‘Great Cycle’ that the Fates seem fixated on. By the way, a cycle is also another name for a series of plays that are interconnected—like the plays by Aeschylus that tell the story of the beginning of the Furies. It’s called the Oresteia. ”
    “Yeah,” Matt said ruefully. “I’ve read that one. Now tell me about the specific roles that the Fates mentioned tonight. Have you always known about them?”
    “Yes. No one really knows what those roles mean, though. Or what the Fates intend for them.”
    “How can that be?”
    “Because they’re vague. Think about it. The roles are the Hero, the Shield, the Lover, and the Warrior—and seriously? That could mean any one of the Scions who have been born, since like ever. We’re a bunch of hero, warrior, lover, shield-the-weak-with-your-body kind of people,” she said, mildly exasperated with how predictable her kind were. “The only role that has specific portents attached to it is the Tyrant, and all of the Houses over the eons have been super vigilant about the signs surrounding